Welcome, 77 artists, 40 different points of Attica welcomes you by singing Erotokritos an epic romance written at 1713 by Vitsentzos Kornaros

Saturday, January 6, 2018

GREECE and Cyprus are among the most popular destinations as UK holidaymakers seek a sunshine getaway. After recovering well last year, Turkey is set to return as one of the nation's favourite holiday locations with inquiries up by nearly a quarter year-on-year since Christmas Day, Thomas Cook said.

"We had booked a holiday to GREECE, my favourite place in the world, took off to the Greek islands, and I was six weeks when I had my first miscarriage which happened out there," she revealed. "I had to get a boat and then into a hospital in Athens where nobody was speaking any English, and it was the ...

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — AEK and PAOK enjoyed big wins on Saturday to share the lead in the Greek league. Tassos Bakasetas scored a goal, assisted on another and gained a penalty in the first half to lead AEK to a 4-1 win at Panetolikos. Bakasetas opened ...

The municipalities of Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, all in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, called for the boycott over Jerusalem's GREEK Orthodox patriarch allegedly allowing controversial real estate sales. Theophilos III was expected on Saturday afternoon to lead a traditional Christmas ...

JERUSALEM - The head of the GREEK Orthodox Church in Jerusalem visited the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Saturday for Christmas celebrations, but he did not receive a warm reception. Protesters lobbed eggs at Patriarch Theophilos III's convoy, while one woman beat a car with a shoe.

Located on Long Pond Road, the GREECE Museum is a thriving, nonprofit, educational facility. Nearly 500 students visited the GREECE Museum in 2017, but families are always invited to visit too. The museum offers many fine exhibits throughout the year. Through April 2018 you can see Winning the Vote: ...

[Preview] A convoy of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch has been attacked by Palestinians during his visit to the West Bank. The protesters accuse the Patriarch of treason for allegedly selling land to Jewish investors. Read Full Article at RT.com

The arrival of Greek Patriarch Theophilos III in Bethlehem was the center of a protest against church land sales to Jewish groups. Some townships had called for a boycott of the midnight mass attended by the patriarch. Hundreds of Palestinians protesting ...

Swimmers hold a GREEK flag after a race to retrieve a wooden cross which was thrown into the waters by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, during the Epiphany ceremony to bless the waters at the Golden Horn in Istanbul, Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018.

In Istanbul, the GREEK Orthodox Christian community celebrated Epiphany with the traditional blessing of the waters. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of GREEK Orthodox Christians and the Archbishop of Constantinople, led the liturgy Saturday at the Patriarchal Cathedral of St.

Daniel Rogich, pastor of Holy Trinity GREEK Orthodox Church. “There is no life without water; yet it is also the symbol of destruction and death, and finally, it is the symbol of purification, for there is no cleanliness without it.” “For Christians, as for all humans, water surrounds us in the womb, washes and ...

GREEK Orthodox Christians were pictured plunging into rivers and open water to chase after a cross in Istanbul and Cyprus today. According to tradition, the priest throws the cross into the water and the swimmer that returns the cross will be blessed. Eastern Orthodox churches believe the Epiphany ...

Everyone assumed that when Kratos had murdered every god and titan and hero of GREEK mythology that there was little left for the character to do, and it was time to move on. But it turns out we weren't thinking outside the box enough. "The GREEK games were the GREEK era of God of War," says game ...

ATHENS, GREECE (AP) — Public notaries in GREECE's capital of Athens have called off auctions of foreclosed properties, citing disruptions from security measures for a visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The association of Athens notaries said Tuesday that traffic restrictions and other police ...

The number of arrivals has sharply dropped since the European Union reached a deal with Turkey in March 2016 to close a main route along the Eastern Mediterranean into GREECE. The IOM reported on Friday that 171,635 migrants and refugees entered Europe by sea in 2017, down from 363,504 ...

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pledged to support financially the transport between the islands with the mainland. He said he will subsidize ferry tickets for islanders and the extra cost of transporting goods to and from the islands. Our goal is that this measure to not apply only to the Dodecanese or the islands of East … The post Tsipras pledges to subsidize tickets and transport cost for the islands appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Cyprus is expecting some remarks by the Greek government before it concludes with the delimitation of its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), President Nicos Anastasiades has said. Replying to questions by the press on Saturday, after attending the Holy ...

A GREEK Orthodox man identified as Nikos Solis kisses the wooden cross in the chilly Bosphorus, during Epiphany Day celebration in Istanbul, on Saturday. The cross was thrown into the water by Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomaios, the spiritual leader of the world's GREEK Orthodox Christians.

Nicolaos Solis from GREECE kisses the wooden cross which was thrown into the waters by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, during the Epiphany ceremony to bless the waters at the Golden Horn in Istanbul, Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel). The Associated Press. THE ASSOCIATED ...

Nicolaos Solis from GREECE kisses the wooden cross which was thrown into the waters by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, during the Epiphany ceremony to bless the waters at the Golden Horn in Istanbul, Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel). The Associated Press. THE ASSOCIATED ...

“The same can be said for the arrivals in GREECE with 29,595 for 2017, absolutely the lowest in the four years we have been keeping numbers on GREECE,” he said. In 2016, some 173,614 migrants arrived by sea in GREECE, according to IOM figures. Some 21,663 migrants arrived in Spain as of Dec.

Hundreds of Greek Orthodox Christians on Saturday demonstrated at the entrance to Bethlehem against Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem, called him “traitor” and even tried to prevent him from entering the Church of the Nativity. The Greek Orthodox ...

Contact between the two communities over the years has dispelled many prejudices and political narratives and Turkish Cypriots view GREEK Cypriots in a more positive light but they still don't want mixed cohabitation, the results of three University of Cyprus surveys since 2007 have shown. According to ...

Greece’s Deputy Education Minister Kostas Zouraris is known for his controversial and often provocative views. Some times, he even can get downright offensive, and sticks to his unprofessional behavior. The 77-year-old academic got elected to parliament ...

Thomas described how she and her husband had been trying for a baby and, when she became pregnant, they went for a holiday in GREECE. “I was over the moon,” she said. It was while on holiday in GREECE, however, that tragedy struck. She said: “I was six weeks when I suffered my first miscarriage.”.

A big rescue operation has been going on since Saturday morning to save a woman who has been injured in area Stephani in Mount Olympus. The health condition of the 35-year-old woman from FYROM (Skopje) is considered as serious. According to a statement, the Greek Rescue Team was informed about the incident at 10.53 through … The post Big rescue operation underway after climber accident in Mt Olympus appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem arrived in Bethlehem under heavy protection by Palestinian security forces, after hundreds of protests tried to keep him out of the city. Palestinian Christians were demonstrating against the church's decision to ...

Annunciation GREEK Orthodox Church will begin the new year with a blessing of waters at the Niagara River. The tradition of Epiphany will be celebrated on 1 p.m. Sunday at Broderick Park at the foot of Ferry Street. The ceremony commemorates the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. The water ...

[brexit vote leave supporters] * DESPITE SUFFERING SOME LOSSES IN 2017, A LOOK AT LONG-TERM TRENDS SHOWS THAT POPULISTS ARE LIKELY TO CONTINUE HOLDING ONTO POWER IN THE FUTURE. * ALTHOUGH IT IS UNLIKELY WE WILL SEE THE KIND OF BOMBSHELL EVENTS WE SAW IN 2016 AGAIN, POPULISTS ARE LIKELY TO GAIN SEATS IN GOVERNMENTS IN EUROPE IN 2018. * YOU CAN DRIVE FROM POLAND TO GREECE RIGHT NOW AND NEVER HAVE TO TRAVEL THROUGH A COUNTRY THAT DOESN'T HAVE POPULISTS IN POWER. * ALTHOUGH THE FOCUS IN RECENT YEARS HAS BEEN ON THE POPULIST RIGHT, THE POPULIST LEFT IS LIKELY TO MAKE SIGNIFICANT GAINS IN SOUTHERN EUROPE IN THE NEAR FUTURE. ------------------------- Populist movements have been on the rise for at least two decades, but anxiety about the phenomenon reached its high point a year ago. That should be no surprise. 2016 was the year in which populism went primetime: Over the course of a few disorienting months, the people of Britain voted to leave the European Union and the people of the United States made Donald Trump their president. Most commentators around the world assumed that 2017 would bring even more shocking news. The world as we knew it might be about to end. A year on, it is clear that such fears were exaggerated. In the first round of the French presidential election, populists on the left and the right took about half of the vote. But when Emanuel Macron faced the far-right Marine Le Pen in the second round, he won comfortably. Similarly, in Germany, a far-right populist party entered the _Bundestag_ for the first time since World War II. But moderate parties retain a clear majority in parliament, and when the next government is finally constituted, it will likely remain as moderate and milquetoast as the last. It would be tempting to draw the wrong lesson from this — and indeed some commentators already have. "The populist wave has crested, soon to abate," Charles Krauthammer summarized the new conventional wisdom in an op-ed this past April. After a scary couple of years, things are seemingly returning to normal. We draw a different set of lessons from the same story. Traumatic though they were, it never made sense to look at the events of 2016 and conclude that populists would henceforth win every single election, or that they would manage to destroy longstanding political systems as soon as they gained power. And so it never made sense to measure the populists' progress by a binary yardstick, with everything short of sensational wins implying that populists were already being forced into a hasty retreat. LOOKING AT PAST LONG-TERM TRENDS To get a clear view of whether populism is growing or subsiding, we should therefore be comparing their current strength to their performance in previous years. To do this, we set out to construct a comprehensive data set of the electoral performance of European populist movements since 2000. First, a brief definition. For the purposes of our study, we didn't treat populism as a deep ideology, but rather a logic of political organization, one that sharply distinguishes between supporters, who are portrayed as the whole of the legitimate people, and opponents, who are cast as the people's illegitimate enemies. To be populist, in other words, a movement simply has to claim to represent the true will of a unified people against domestic elites, foreign migrants, or ethnic, religious, or sexual minorities. [Marine Le Pen]REUTERS/Eric Gaillard The picture that emerges is very clear: Populist movements had been gradually gaining votes well before the shock year of 2016. And they have continued to do so since. While the average vote share for European populist parties was 9.6% in 2000 and 17.2% in 2008, for example, it is now 24.6%. The clearest way of understanding the rapid advance of the populists is to chart their progress on a time-series map. A first glance reveals the basic story: a blue wave has slowly conquered the continent. But a closer look reveals three key — and hitherto underappreciated — features of the populist rise. POPULISTS HAVE LOTS OF POWER — AND ARE LIKELY TO GAIN MORE First, populism is now the predominant form of government in a huge, populous, and strategically crucial part of Central Europe. It is now possible to drive from the Baltic Sea all the way to the Aegean without once leaving a country ruled by a populist. The implications are enormous. Far from being a small, insurgent force, populism has proved capable of capturing power in a large number of countries. As a result, hopes of a democratic Europe that extends from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic — containing all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe celebrated by Winston Churchill in his Iron Curtain speech — has been dashed: Barely three decades after these parts of Europe were liberated from Soviet domination, democracy is now fighting for its very survival in Budapest and Prague, in Belgrade and Warsaw. Second, right-wing populists have not yet led the government in a single Western European country. It would be easy to conclude that their influence remains limited in much of the continent. But that would be a mistake: As our map shows, right-wing populists are now part of the government in many countries, from Greece to Austria to Norway. [Austria's leader of the People's Party (OeVP) Sebastian Kurz leaves a meeting with President Alexander Van der Bellen in Vienna, Austria, December 14, 2017. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger]Thomson Reuters What's more, the influence of the populists is rapidly growing even in countries where they are not in power: To stave off the competition from the extremes, traditionally moderate parties in countries including France and Austria have recently lurched to the right. Indeed, when members of France's _Les Republicains_ were faced with a choice between traditional conservatives like Florence Portelli and Maël de Cala or a much more radical candidates by the name of Laurent Wauquiez, they chose the man who likes to make sly allusions to theories according to which a mass of immigrants threatens to replace the white race. Similarly, Austria's conservative People's Party has quickly radicalized under the new leadership of Sebastian Kurz, and so it does not come as a surprise that the new Kurz-led government, which includes a heavy presence from the populist Freedom Party, has already announced plans to confiscate all money from arriving asylum seekers and to purge left-wing voices within the country's public broadcaster. Finally, it is a mistake to focus exclusively on right-wing populism. Just as a populist belt, mostly composed of right-leaning parties, has already covered much of Central Europe, so too a second populist belt, mostly composed of left-leaning parties, may one day conquer much of Southern Europe. Many of these movements have grown strong in debtor countries as a result of the euro crisis and a decade of economic stagnation. But while much of their anger is directed at austerity policies that really have done a lot of damage, some of these parties are also proving to be increasingly open to xenophobic appeals, or have started to undermine the independence of the media. Our data makes one thing abundantly clear: the populist rise started well before 2016 — or even 2008. The political transformations we are currently seeing are a long-term trend, and the only plausible explanation for that must be that they are caused by structural drivers which have been at play for a long time. While debate about their exact identity persists, it seems likely that they include economic insecurity; a rebellion against immigration and the notion of a multi-ethnic society; and the greater ease with which extreme voices can make themselves heard in an age of social media. Past trends, of course, are never a sure predictor of the future. Perhaps those structural drivers are about to exhaust themselves, making it easier for moderate parties to regain the initiative in the years to come. But to think that the populist wave has crested just because the record performances of Germany's far-right AfD and France's Marine Le Pen were not enough to catapult them into the very heart of government is deeply misguided; unless politicians manage to identify and counteract the structural drivers of populism, populism is very unlikely to disappear of its own accord. Looking ahead to 2018, we shouldn't expect any dramatic upsets like Trump or Brexit. But opinion polls suggest that populists will continue to make significant inroads in countries with upcoming elections, including Italy, Belgium, and Estonia. The populist wave has not yet crested. Nor is it about to bury us quite yet. But unless we act now, it will keep garnering strength in the years to come. NOW WATCH: Why airplane windows have tiny holes

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian Christians on Saturday pummeled the car of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem during a visit to the occupied West Bank in protest against the church's decision to sell land to Jewish groups. The Greek ...

The Lausanne Convention for Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed on January 30th 1923, that Ataturk had managed to negotiate defined religion as ethnicity for the basis of an exchange of populations between GREECE and Turkey. It provided for a simultaneous expulsion of Greek ...

Animal rights activist organization PETA has delivered around 200 fur coats to refugees on Lesvos, GREECE. The coats were given to Lighthouse Relief, a charity which provides refugees with urgent help, and aims to protect those stranded in camps from the freezing winter temperatures. The animal skin ...

Nicosia will delineate the rest of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), including the north and western part, Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades said, calling on GREECE to offer its “observations” as the Cypriot zones abut GREECE'S EEZ. As for the timing of Nicosia's announcement of the move, which will ...

By Georgios Goulas*, It is really worth exploring what the name of Nikos Galis causes in almost every Greek. It would be interesting to ask our […] The post Coaching a Nation​! The Life Achievement of Nikos Galis appeared first on The National Herald.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Greek Orthodox Christian community in Constantinople has celebrated Epiphany with the traditional blessing of the waters. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, […] The post Greek Orthodox Mark Epiphany with Constantinople Swims appeared first on The National Herald.

Unpaid taxes to the state have passed the 10 billion euros mark in November. One in three Greeks did not pay the taxes they had to with the effect that the total volume of outstanding debts to the tax office to be 11.6 billion euros. And this despite the fact that tax offices proceeded with … The post Greeks’ arrears to the state break all times record reaching €100.73 billion appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

This one, though, is my personal little spin on the GREEK version, stopping short of soaking the little doughnuts in syrup, but instead lightening the whole dish with a drizzle of honey, a sprinkle of lemon juice and the refreshing tartness of a blob of GREEK yoghurt. It turns the recipe into a wonderfully ...

This year things are set to get even bigger for the club as they are now twinned with Heraklion Squash Club in Crete, GREECE. Members from Wellington are heading to the sun in April to play against Heraklion for the first stage of a twinning celebration tournament. Heraklion players will travel to ...

Dozens of Palestinians in Bethlehem are protesting the arrival of the Greek Orthodox patriarch of the Holy Land to celebrate Orthodox Christmas. The protesters scuffled with Palestinian police and church supporters Saturday as Theophilos III made his way ...

You can eat like a king and then walk it off along some of the most heavenly pathways in all of Greece. The island, one of the triumphs of the Cyclades, has for years been a refuge for pleasure-seekers. My sister is one of them. She bought a 300-year-old peasant house ten years ago in the little village of ...

Cyprus has already demarcated its exclusive economic zone to the east and south with Lebanon, Israel and Egypt, leaving out its marine areas adjoining Syria to the east, Turkey to the north and GREECE to the northwest. A move to table coordinates by Cyprus might anger Turkey. "Thinks must start from ...

The charge placed on bags at the beginning of this year is aimed at bringing GREECE in line with its European partners and the EU target. The premise is that if plastic bags are seen as objects of some value we will try to use fewer of them and also use them more than once, thus reducing the need for ...

ATHENS (AP) — Greek league leader Olympiakos has signed former Saint-Etienne coach Oscar Garcia, a day after sacking Takis Lemonis. Olympiakos did not provide any […] The post Olympiakos Signs Former Saint-Etienne Coach Oscar Garcia appeared first on The National Herald.

Investigators raided the office and the Manhattan home of the billionaire Michael H. Steinhardt on Friday afternoon, carrying off several ancient works, Prosecutors say the antiquities were looted from Greece and Italy. Mr. Steinhardt, a hedge-fund manager and philanthropist, has been collecting art from ancient Greece for three decades and has close ties to the … The post US authorities raid billionaire’s home, seize antiquities allegedly looted from Greece and Italy appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Michael Kouskoutis, a member of the committee organizing the large GREEK Orthodox event, said organizers have arranged for dive teams and extra medical personnel as a precaution. But Kouskoutis said past Epiphany events have seen temperatures in the 20s or 30s without an incident. "We've been ...